Sylvia Jukes Morris

Sylvia Jukes Morris is a British-born biographer who now lives in the United States. She is married to the American writer Edmund Morris.

Jukes Morris was born in England, and taught literature there before moving to the U.S. She earned her claim to fame as a biographer with the publication of her book about Clare Boothe Luce, “Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce,” which was published by Random House in 1997. Jukes Morris had access to Luce, her diaries, and papers, and told a juicy tale. The book chronicles Luce’s calculated rise from an unstable and poor childhood through several fortunate relationships and marriages and a career as a journalist to fame as the wife of Henry R. Luce, co-founder of Time Magazine. It ends with her election to Congress in 1943.

The book was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times in 1997.

She is currently working on a book about the second half of Luce’s life.

Jukes Morris also published another biography, “Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady,” first in 1980, and reissued in paperback in 1990 and in 2001, about the second wife of Theodore Roosevelt. She began that book while her husband was writing a play about TR and discovered that nothing had been written about Edith.

Jukes Morris lives in New York and Washington, D.C.

References

* [http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/2002/smorris.html Library of Congress Bookfest biography]
* [http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/smorris.html Random House interview]
* [http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=21307 Random House biography]